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Community Atlas

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Drawing on the last twenty-five years of scholarship in critical cartography and critical GIS, the GEO 509 - Community Mapping workshop begins from the premise that maps are more than windows on the world. Maps do not only provide a record of geographic phenomena but also actually impact the conditions of knowing itself. This ‘more-than-representational’ viewpoint enables a productive urgency at the heart of a collaborative or par ticipatory mapping endeavor. Therefore, the goal for this course was to prepare each student as a responsive and responsible mapmaker, at a moment in digital culture when there are many maps but few stories being told through them. To meet this goal, this course furthers the concept of the community mapshop -- an intensive studio experience in which students use mapping technologies in collaboration, when appropriate, with community partners. These partnerships have involved students in a full range of collaborative mapmaking: working with peers and community partners to invest in a study area, acquiring and preparing data for spatial analyses, communicating with those impacted by or implicated in these analyses, and producing compelling geographic representations.

In this volume, created by students in Spring 2015, we tackle a broad range of topics: